//------------------------------// // Chapter XIV: Little Filly // Story: The Conversion Bureau: Setting Things Right // by kildeez //------------------------------// -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 0625 HOURS ONBOARD THE HMS ILLUSTRIOUS NORTH SEA, OFF THE NORWEGIAN COASTLINE, BOUND FOR KARELIA -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- “Bodies continue to be pulled from the water here in Detroit, with conservative estimates already putting deaths into the hundreds. The apparent culprit: a local Newfoal endowed with magic from one of his fellow unicorns! That’s right, you heard it here first, folks, a Newfoal from the nearby colony apparently escaped his cell after assaulting staff and…” *CLICK* “…recent events in the American mainland, combined with yesterday’s suicide bombing at UNCDI headquarters here at the Newfoal colony outside Hamburg, has some wondering if the terrorist groups so prolific during the Collision Wars have made a return to…” *CLICK* “…between pro- and anti-conversion groups broke out into riots that continue to burn through downtown Los Angeles. Already, two people have died and upwards of fifty homes and businesses have been destroyed, with damage estimated to be in the hundreds of…” *CLICK* “…before the security lockdown, we interviewed a Newfoal amidst the recent rash of jubilation and celebration appearing in each of their colonies, who said quote: ‘She has returned in a new form to deliver us all into the new world, one free of anger, one free of hate, one free of anything but the joy we all find in…’” *CLICK* “…with an additional 10,000 on their way, the British Isles are seeing the largest buildup of American military personnel since the Second World War, though some back in the states criticize spreading their armed forces out, especially given recent events back…” One final *CLICK*, and the TV went quiet. Felipe sighed and leaned back on the cafeteria bench he’d cleared for himself, the sigh quickly devolving into a groan of frustration that rebounded off the walls, adding to the resonant hum from the vending machines in the corner. Any other time, he might have been creeped out by the empty cafeteria, but right now, he just needed a big empty space with hard tile floors and flickering fluorescent lighting. Just someplace big where he could be alone. Felipe ran his hands through his dark hair, now greasy with day-old sweat. His untrimmed nails scratched into his scalp, his breath coming in ragged gasps. This again. He really had to go through all this again. He thought he had left this behind in the months after the Collision Wars: that he had forgotten about the riots, the lynchings, the whole fandom going underground. That he had forgotten about her. With fingers that trembled like an old, arthritic man’s, he reached into his pocket for the object he had been clenching when Anton had dressed his wounds. His bandaged fingers clenched it, tightening as if he wanted to crush it, but at the last minute they loosened. They always loosened. No matter the pain, no matter the terror, no matter the anger and frustration, he never could bring himself to destroy it. After all, they were his last memories of her… ”{Filly, lookit what I got!}” Felipe turned, raising his head from the tech specs on some of the new weapons the squad was getting to the little girl jumping up and down next to his chair. He smiled, brushing the book aside and tossing his legs over the armrest to look right into her grinning face. She started to bring her hands out to show him, but he raised his hand to stop her. “Ut, ut!” He said sharply, and she paused with a knowing smile on her face. “{I haven’t seen you all day, so what do we do first?}” Still grinning, the little girl leaned forward and pressed her tiny lips to his cheek, giving him a hug. “{I missed you, big brother!}” “{There we go,}” he said, nodding satisfactorily, like a teacher after one of their students answered a question from the previous day’s reading correctly. “{So, which one did you get this time?}” Still hopping up and down with glee, the little girl presented her prize to the older man: a plastic Princess Celestia figurine with brushable mane, already splayed out crazily thanks to its journey from the store in her pocket. Felipe smiled at the sight. “{Now, this one is…Luna, right?}” “{You know who it is!}” She giggled, shoving his shoulder playfully. “{Oh, maybe you need to refresh my memory?}” The girl, grinning with triumph now, sang: “{It’s Princess Celestia! Twilight’s mentor!}” “{That’s right!}” He gasped, eyes lighting up as if he really were remembering. “{Thank you for reminding me, my little dreamer!}” That earned him a salute and a cheeky grin from the little girl. “{No problem, big…}” The memory ended as he held the figurine in between two of his fingers. Princess Celestia had seen better days: her nose was mashed up, and one of her forelegs was missing below the knee. The little sticker making one of her eyes was almost completely gone, and her mane, once only tangled and bedraggled, was now clumpy with dirt and sweat, its rainbow color almost completely gone. The white coat still carried a bit of soot from when he had first scooped it up from the cold, lifeless hand, crushed to death by a beam when the worst of the riots had rocked his beloved Rio, all because… “{Because you were supposed to be better!}” He screamed, whipping the tiny figurine at the wall with the force of an MLB fastball pitcher. The figure hit the wall and bounced off with a new dent in its hide. “{Why!? Why couldn’t you be what you were supposed to be!? Why couldn’t you be what I needed you to be!?}“ He bellowed, following up with a stomp that added another treadmark to the growing collection on its side. His mind lost to his rage, Felipe followed that stomp up with another, and another, the empty cafeteria echoing with his mostly-incoherent cries, his stomach growing sick with his own anger. When the worst of it had abated, he raised his face to the ceiling, screaming at no one in particular: “{FUUUUUUCK YOOOUUUUU…}” His shoulders rose and fell as his pulse beat heavily in his ears. He moved his foot a little. One more good stomp would probably do it. One more hit, and the little reminder of what was lost could be gone forever. Another stomp could finally end this pain. Except it wouldn’t, and he knew it. He would always remember the little girl who would never shove her tiny hand in his again. Nor would she bound back into the house that didn’t exist anymore, beyond excitement to tell him about the new toy she had scrimped and saved to buy. She wouldn’t even sit on his lap in their father’s study with their beat-up old Lenovo, streaming episodes of their favorite show on one tab while he had that night’s article on team tactics or squad-building exercises open in another. So he hesitated, and in that hesitation, his phone went off, a rubber-ducky squeak telling him he had a new text. His foot still hovering over the figure, Felipe pulled the phone out of his back pocket and scanned it. “Code Red: Target Beta cell,” from Chen. He let out his breath in a long, shaky sigh, then leaned down to scoop up the figure. He added a derisive snort and a muttered “{Fucking bitch…}” for good measure before taking off at a dead run, out the cafeteria, towards the hallway, his dress shoes thudding against the tile… Until he stopped, right in the hallway outside the door. A thought had occurred to him. A Code Red would have everyone swarming into Beta’s cell, Alpha would be relatively unguarded. At most, Lisa or Anton would be there, and he could probably just walk past them. Who would question it? He looked down the hall towards the little purple Alicorn’s cell, then turned and began walking in the opposite direction. An odd little smile crossed his face. It was a bit like his own private joke. All this time he’d been demanding answers from a little plastic toy, but now, the real deal was just down the hallway. ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Anton Beloglazov didn’t sleep well these days. Maybe nobody did once they reached their forties, and anybody who said they did was just lying through their damned teeth. Either way, it didn’t matter. To him, his bed was mostly a place where he spent nights staring at his ceiling, counting planks in the wood paneling and trying very hard not to succumb to the voices of the past echoing in his head, whispering, echoing, and sometimes, screaming at the top of their lungs for him to make that final leap and dive into the swirling, chaotic pool that was his memories. In the beginning, it had been difficult to repeatedly whisper “no” to those voices until they calmed again, but these days, he found he was able to tune them out most of the time. Most of the time. Thankfully for this little afternoon nap, this was one of those times. He was able to prop his leather-soled shoes up in his Lay-Z-Boy (he always hated that name, as if a man ever taking a moment to put his feet up automatically qualified as lazy), entwine his fingers across his chest, and ignore the faint humming of the fluorescent lights, pretending that it didn’t remind him of the whine of a T-90’s engine as it crushed some dark-skinned boy’s skull… He grimaced. Welp, so much for that plan, he sighed, his face relaxing again as he turned over to face the door, the pleather cooling his cheek. His eyes remained closed, and he felt them strain as they rolled back in his sockets. For some reason, this position felt natural to him, as if it were able to completely shut out the flurry of activity in the darkness behind his eyelids. It signaled the beginning of a sort of meditative state, probably not much like whatever voodoo the Eastern philosophers had come up with, but something he had developed over the years as a sort of substitute for sleep. It certainly resembled sleep, at the very least, and for the Russian, this was often enough. The door rushed open with a pneumatic hiss, like every door on this goddamned ship, but instead of sitting up to see who it was, Anton felt himself seized by a sort of childish playfulness. People always seemed to take a sleeping man as an invitation to act as if they were alone, as if the sleeper was nothing more than a noise detector, like in that one godawful Tom Cruise film the Americans loved so much. Another thing Anton had learned over the years was how much you could learn about a person if they thought they were alone, as he had learned much about the people who mistook his “meditation” for real sleep. His wife, for instance. Or wait, that was ex-wife now… The newcomer took two steps into the room before apparently seeing Anton in the Lay-Z-Boy, and immediately froze. That twisted something in Anton’s gut. People who were trying to be courteous to a sleeper might tiptoe, or move with a sort of slow, clumsy gait, but they did not freeze. The only people who froze were the ones trying to hide something. Either way, Anton slipped into his meditative state, his whole body relaxing in a way almost identical to sleep, his mind emptying of everything except for an awareness of every sound entering his ear, cataloguing it to be analyzed when full functionality returned to his brain. The newcomer stepped lightly, though to Anton, this was not the step of a courteous man, but of a suspicious one. Something in the way they carried themselves as they crossed the room, perhaps. There was something too professional about it, too much like a sniper gliding through the bush with a rifle in hand and a target in mind. This was the walk of a man behind enemy lines, and the moment he heard it, Anton almost lost his composure and the meditative state he had achieved. Almost. He listened on as the nearly-inaudible footsteps tapped across the tile, bound for the airlock door. Then came the familiar pneumatic rush of the lock disengaging, the door shooting open, and a pause. Anton made very sure to remain still during this pause: whoever was over there would be watching him like a hawk, looking for any signs of him stirring. After a few moments of silence, the Russian threw in a yawn and a quick jerk as if his sleep had been disturbed, then he immediately laid back down without opening his eyes, turning over on his side away from the door. The ploy worked. A few moments later, a couple more taps sounded, and then the door rushed shut. Anton opened his eyes in time to watch the retreating back of a young man’s head through the porthole in the airlock, the man bending over the keypad, no doubt to activate his lockout code. The Russian smiled knowingly. “Good luck with that,” he whispered, patting his pocket before standing up, still out of sight of the porthole.